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Thursday, July 9, 2009

John Hersey High School Class of 1989 20th Reunion!

It's been 20 years since we last walked the halls of John Hersey High School and that means it's time for our 20th Reunion!

The reunion has already begun over on the JHHS Class of 1989 Facebook page. If you're not on Facebook, we've got almost 50% of our class already registered, catching up, and even sometimes meeting up for pre-reunion get-togethers. Facebook is the place to be for all the latest news and Reunion plans.

Thanks to Kelly (Kent) Horna we will have a 20th High School Reunion! She has taken the lead and made all the arrangements, so all the rest of us need to do is (1) reach out to our friends and encourage them to attend and (2) show up!

We will be celebrating during the same weekend Hersey celebrates Homecoming Weekend - October 9-10, 2009.

The fun begins at Friday night's home football game against rival Buffalo Grove. Kickoff is at 7:30pm.

At 6pm, the party continues at Lamplighter Inn Tavern & Grille, 60 N. Bothwell St., Palatine. There will be a $3-$5 cover charge per person to rent the entire upstairs of Lamplighters. We will have our own bartender and servers. We have 4 hours of catching up, drinking and eating to do. To keep costs down, this will also be a cash bar. A band will move into the upstairs room at 10 pm and you have your choice of staying and listening to the band or you can head over to Durty Nellie's to finish off the night.

Kelly will need a head count and money for the room by October 3rd. You can contact her through Facebook.

For many of us, it's been 20 years since we last saw our friends from high school and quite a few of us had known each other since Kindergarten - or before. Whatever feelings about high school remain, whether our individual experiences were good, bad, or ugly, we all share the unique history of having grown up in the 80s in the idyllic Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. I bet we can all remember what class we were sitting in when the announcement was made about the Space Shuttle Challenger. For me, it was Mrs. Sharer's French Class. A couple of years later, we cheered the football team on to Hersey's first Football State Championship with the quarterback from our class - Duke Tobin. Is it any coincidence that no Hersey sports team has won a State Championship since we left? Some of us spent two days during Senior Year being interviewed by the Today Show as part of Marriage and Family Class and got up early on New Year's Day 1989 to watch whether we made the cut.

Band trips, ACT's and SAT's, Wag's, debate touraments, open campus and lunches at Nikko's, school plays, driver's ed, student council, football games, Orchesis, Homecoming, Turnabout, Prom, smoking on the corner. These were all part of our collective Hersey experience. That we weren't all in the same social circles matters little with the benefit of 20 years of life between then and now. What's important now is coming together to celebrate how far we've come and rejoice in all that we share. It's far more than what ever divided us in the first place.

Yes, it's a busy time in our lives with careers, kids, and many other things. But if not now, then when? Our 20th Reunion only happens once and it will certainly be another 10 years before we're all together again.

I hope everyone will be able to attend. Please reach out to your friends from Hersey Class of 89 - even if it's been 20 years - and know about this event and get registered on Facebook. You can find some on the JHHS Alumni Database, Facebook, Classmates.com, My Space, and the JHHS directory that was published a few years ago. If you can't find them in those places, try calling their parents if they are still in the area. We don't have a reunion planning company, so the success of our 20th Reunion depends on each of us. The more people we personally connect with and invite, the more fun we'll have in October.

About Little Merry Sunshine

A native of Chicago's Northwest Suburbs and resident of the North Shore, Jessica Gardner is passionately opinionated about everything (and we mean EVERYTHING) including local, national, and international politics, sports, news, and martinis, to name a few. The eternal optimist with moments of confusion (she’s blonde after all), Jessica’s musings can be found on her blog, Little Merry Sunshine. When not working (and as an Alumni Relations Manager and business owner, Jessica is almost always working), she volunteers, debates politics, attends wine tastings, cooks, reads, watches The West Wing DVDs, cheers for the Cubs, and plans Ravinia outings and other gatherings for her friends. In spite of her love of all things Chicago – sports, pizza, the lake, etc. – Jessica lives for her time away from it all (her laptop, cell phone, tv, social media, etc.) in Northern Michigan and loves country music, which her friends pretend to not know about.